I hope everybody keeps bitching about the officiating in the Super Bowl. It'll give Bill Cower and Joey Porter lots of bulletin board material.

And I hope people stay away from NFL games next year because the game's integrity has been violated. It'll just mean more Steeler fans at away games.

The same guy who was a short time ago debating the exact sequence of thoughts that were going through a refs head during a 2 second span of the game (...it looked like he was going to spot the ball short, then he raised his arms, what was going on in his mind between those two moments seperated by some portion of a second...) is now calling me a parser(!) because I dare to suggest judgement calls were made all over the field during the Super Bowl, as though (gasp!) every call made by an official in every sport is a judgement call.

There are page after page here talking about the details of 3 or 4 calls that went against Seattle. Did Ben score, or should the ball have been spotted 2 inches further to the right. Was that a push, or just sort of a push. Was that hold enough of a hold to be called a hold. What is that besides parsing the plays???

I understand people feeling sad after a loss. I understand questions about various calls. What I don't accept is calling a win cheap, or suspect, or fixed because of a selective memory of all the calls made during a game, and a selective memory of the rules themselves.

If you want to discuss a given play, then let's talk about that play.

If you want to say the game was stolen because of the sum of the calls in the game then you have to be willing to discuss ALL of the calls. Not just the handful you didn't like.

If you want someone to say it's ok to feel bad when your team loses, consider it said. Was that ever debated by anyone???

Otherwise respect the right of Steeler fans to enjoy a win, just as we must respect your right to feel bad about a loss. Fair and square.

The contraversy about the officiating was one of the few things to liven the game up. My take? I could see the call on Big Ben's TD. It looked like the tip of the ball got to the line before his shoulder was driven back. It certainly wasn't definitive in the negative. The pass interference call was a no-brainer. That was a textbook definition of pushing off to gain separation. All the pushing came from one man and the back judge almost swallowed his whistle trying to get the flag out. He never hesitated in his mental processing of the play.

The holding calls were the penalty one takes when one is blocking with his hands outside the frame of his body. As a football coach, I always tell my O-line that they can often get away with murder if their hands are in tight, but once they get wide, especially when the arm locks under the shoulder of the defender...look out.

The call on Hasselback was dumb, and I think Haggens was offside, at least within the context of how offside is called in the US.